Bill and Ted's Excellent Fighting Game

[davidn]

As Whitney's away this week it's a chance to use our Gamefly account to try out some games that she normally wouldn't play. Well, as their shipping is so slow, just the one - a fighting game called (I promise you) Guilty Gear XX Accent Core arrived in the post yesterday evening. The Japanese, apart from their unique sense of mania, seem to have a unique approach to sequel numbering - at least Final Fantasy was moderately normal even if they get increasingly inaccurately-titled as the series goes on, but Soul Calibur took three goes before even settling on a name, and this series (as far as I can tell) went for calling the sequels and updates #Reload, X, X2, and XX. I'd been told by various sources that the entire game was one very large ball of heavy metal references, and after spending a couple of hours with it I can see what they mean. It's about ludicrous bombast and loads of hair.

The tone of the game was very clear right from the first few frames of the introduction, which epileptically flashed the characters and their names on to the screen slightly faster than I could keep up with, to the tune of a blistering guitar solo. The characters seemed to get more and more far-fetched as it went on (along with their weapons - the last of them was brandishing a not-so-deadly looking guitar.) And after that sonic onslaught it dumps you at the title screen wondering what happened.

The menu seemed slightly more subdued with a solo bass, before eventually going into more jazzy electric guitar piece. Now, I don't know about you, but on starting a game for the first time I have this neurotic habit of going straight into the Options screen immediately, even though I have little hope of knowing what anything does before actually playing the game to find out, and this was no exception. I was amused to see that the page titles were written in an approximation of Iron Maiden's font, but beyond that I quickly confused myself - most of the control names were fairly self-explanatory, but what, for example, are "Dust" and "Respect", and is it advisable to have those up on the same set of shoulder buttons, or is that going to make things phenomenally uncomfortable? Backing out of all this, I decided I needed the Training mode.

Yet another fast and lively metal instrumental was the soundtrack for the fighter select music, and I quickly felt a bit overwhelmed. The last time I played a fighting game, they started you off with ten or so characters and you could flip through them to find the one you liked the look of best. With this approach it seemed that the character I picked first would always become my favourite - King from Tekken and Voldo from Soul Calibur (formerly Blade (formerly Edge)), for example. This one throws no less than 23 at you at the same time, but I had been forewarned about the range of characters by kjorteo and told that one of the easier ones to start off with was Ky Kiske, a floppy-haired swordsman in a white floaty thing who is named after Kai Hansen and Michael Kiske from Helloween (and just about everywhere else) and has moves named after Metallica and Yngwie Malmsteen albums. His in-game profile says he's French and enjoys collecting tea cups.

A twelve-foot-tall man with a bag on his head slaps a possessed Australian named after Frank Zappa, in one of the game's calmer moments.

So after getting used to the movement and the very unusual-feeling lack of a third dimension, I had a go at seeing what the controls did. I quickly found out that the previously mentioned "Dust" button is a slow but powerful launch move that blasts your opponent about fifty feet into the air, and if you hold Up when it connects then you'll both shoot into outer space from where you can freely hit them as many times as you can before you both come tumbling back to earth. My major difficulty with the controls is caused by the only fighting series I've really played for ages being Soul Calibur, which has very unusual controls in that Block is on a face button instead of Back. So my instinct to hit X when something attacks me just results in me performing an ineffective kick against the incoming giant missiles of doom.

Importantly, though, the Training mode didn't actually seem to provide much training. A sparse command list was provided, of course, but uniquely it didn't give any move names or effects, only suggesting a few combinations to try out for myself. And I memorized a few of them. I did attempt to look up an FAQ for a fuller explanation of how the game worked, but that just resulted in huge confusion as to what game I was actually playing - as if the sequel numbering confusion wasn't bad enough, the game is apparently a compilation of two updates to the second sequel, or something, and even the mighty GameFAQs doesn't have much in the way of help for it, instead expecting you to defer to the other games (possibly called X2, XX or #Reload). Faced with this situation, I decided to abandon this plan and instead go with my dad's approach to fighting games - start off with no clue about the mechanics, hit buttons to see what they do, and muddle through from there.

And that worked decently for me for a while. Fights are introduced by an enthusiastic announcer who sounds vaguely like the man who used to do the voiceover for Iron Chef, and it's a sure indication of the game's musical influence that they've gone for "Let's Rock!" instead of the more traditional "Fight!". After that it's a matter of flying around the screen hitting each other until one of you reduces the other's health bar to zero. The opponents in my first run-through included a Hot Topic-looking woman brandishing a really serious Keyblade, a robotic version of Ky, slightly resembling Viktor Von Doom from the Fantastic Four, and a girl in a red pirate outfit whose choice of projectiles seemed to be dolphins.

This is pretty much all I saw of the boss.

It was somebody named Eddie, presumably after Iron Maiden's mascot as his choice of fighting stage is none other than Hell, who first gave me problems. He's a ghostly spectre possessing the body of one of the fighters from the previous games, who was named after Zatoichi the blind swordsman. And his shape-shifting spike-summoning cheating was something that I found myself unable to defend against. Eventually I seemed to realize the tone of the game and gave up on physical attacks in favour of spamming blue missiles back at him, which saw him off fairly quickly. And with this new approach I got all the way up to Sol-Badguy (a name that's asking for it if ever there was one), but I never got his health bar more than halfway down before he absolutely flattened me, so I decided to call it a night and research more of what I was supposed to be doing (or set the difficulty level down).

Out of all the fighting games I've played seeing as I grew up with the PC route instead of games consoles where they were more common, it's most similar to One Must Fall, with the emphasis on projectile attacks, scores flying around as you counter and hit things, and downplaying of combination attacks (which this game has chosen to call Beat). The sprite work is amazing - there's something about 2D drawn artwork that keyframing things in 3D can't quite capture, and it never seems to age, especially when put alongside early Gouraud-shaded 3D efforts like Tekken. And naturally, the music, in fitting with the game's theme, is pretty fantastic as well.

The sheer madness of it makes it feel rather like Evil Zone, but with an actual decent game backing it up. Perhaps it would have made a bit more sense if I could understand the Japanese that the characters bellow at each other while hitting each other with fans, magic missiles and musical instruments. But I doubt it, somehow.

Comments

[kjorteo]

Allow me to provide some help!

And this series (as far as I can tell) went for calling the sequels and updates #Reload, X, X2, and XX.

Actually, the chronology (complete with subtitles that almost no one actually uses, but they can assist with figuring out which game is which) is Guilty Gear: The Missing Link, then Guilty Gear X: By Your Side, then Guilty Gear XX: The Midnight Carnival. The series has been stuck in Street Fighter II limbo since XX where they just keep calling their new games a new version of XX instead of, say, XXX or something. The Guilty Gear XX games are, in chronological order, XX, XX #Reload, XX Slash, Isuka (which is still an XX game even though it just says Guilty Gear Isuka for some reason), and XX Accent Core. There's also a DS port in there somewhere that may or may not count for anything.

most of the control names were fairly self-explanatory, but what, for example, are "Dust" and "Respect", and is it advisable to have those up on the same set of shoulder buttons, or is that going to make things phenomenally uncomfortable?

It seems from the next paragraph that you already figured out what an actual Dust is, but it's worth mentioning that down+Dust for everyone is their sweep/trip, and air Dust is another attack which of course varies by character. Also, the Dust button is usually how you do Force Breaks, which are usually more powerful versions of moves that cost 25% tension to do. (Millia, for example, can throw a normal laser disc with down-down/forward-forward+S, or a super laser disc with down-down/forward-forward+D.)

It was somebody named Eddie, presumably after Iron Maiden's mascot as his choice of fighting stage is none other than Hell, who first gave me problems. He's a ghostly spectre possessing the body of one of the fighters from the previous games, who was named after Zatoichi the blind swordsman. And his shape-shifting spike-summoning cheating was something that I found myself unable to defend against.

Eddie is a bastard. What makes him balanced is that he is ridiculously hard to play, as not only do you have to keep track of all the spikes and stuff everywhere, but you also essentially have to play two characters at the same time; the big guy who does things when a button is pressed, and a little shadow helper guy with his own array of shapeshifting attacks that execute when a pressed button is released. This is little comfort to having to play against him in the hands of a competent CPU, of course.

I should mention that Arcade Mode is set so that you always fight nine completely randomly chosen opponents, then someone they hard-coded in as your chosen character's rival (Ky's is Sol), then Boss I-No, who, despite what you may have said about her guitar, is possibly the third-most SNK boss Guilty Gear has ever made, behind Boss Dizzy (who was the endboss of X, then greatly toned down to make her playable and even remotely balanced as of XX) and Boss Order-Sol (who you get a chance to fight after I-No if you clear all of Arcade Mode without losing a single match.) Where I'm going with this is that the game ramps up the difficulty the further on you get--even at the highest setting, the first two fights are rather lame, but you always meet your rival at absolute full power, and it just so happens that Millia's rival is Eddie. About the only matchup I can think that's less fair than that is Slayer's, who is Potemkin. (It's been a while since I tried Arcade Mode in Accent Core, but I remember in #Reload that getting past Potemkin with Slayer of all people was about ten times harder than actually beating I-No when I finally did.)

[kjorteo]

Go character limits.

And with this new approach I got all the way up to Sol-Badguy (a name that's asking for it if ever there was one), but I never got his health bar more than halfway down before he absolutely flattened me,

As stated above, I'm going to guess that's because Sol is Ky's rival so you made it all the way to the penultimate fight, where they really stop kidding around. Lower difficulty may be in order until you really get the hang of things, especially if you expect to last more than about three seconds against I-No. (As an SNK Boss, she'll always have blatantly unfair tricks that the playable version doesn't, like taking about two seconds to refill her tension gauge from 0 to 100% and having an overdrive that, despite its maddening input for anyone trying to play her, she under the guise of the CPU can throw so fast that she can use it as part of a combo string, and it that takes off about 3/4 of your health if it hits.)

Perhaps it would have made a bit more sense if I could understand the Japanese that the characters bellow at each other while hitting each other with fans, magic missiles and musical instruments. But I doubt it, somehow.

Most of it is actually Calling Your Attacks with a thick enough Japanese accent that it's hard to notice at first. For example, I assumed Testament was just speaking random indecipherable Japanese while doing his Nightmare Circular overdrive, until I suddenly discovered that he was actually saying "Nightmare Circular."

[kjorteo]

Oh, and this may be total information overload to someone who's new to the series, but the character-by-character frame data and spiffy player's guide (may I suggest starting with the latter) should tell you everything you need to know. I recommend them with the caveat that they were written by hardcore tournament players and cover way advanced skills as a result. They spoke down enough that it's mostly accessible (I wouldn't be recommending them otherwise,) but if you ever find yourself saying "I think I understand this concept, but why would I ever need to actually take advantage of it?" the short answer is you don't.